Off-topic post on why baseball used to be better

The baseball World Series started last night, and as my US readers will know the Philadelphia Phillies dominated the New York Yankees in game one. I've made my feelings about the Yankees known, so this was a blessed event indeed. But that's not the subject of this post.

It was fascinating to me for nostalgic reasons, since it was the first series of which I was cognizant, as a seven-going-on-eight lad. But here's the real thing.

Some of you may remember around Wimbledon time when I happened to see the broadcast of 1975's Wimbledon men's final between Jimmy Connors and Arthur Ashe, and I was shocked at how bad they were compared to today's players. This time, there was a difference all right, but in support of the past over the present.

The game was so much faster then! The pitchers were Bob Gibson for the redbirds, one of the all time greats, and Denny McLlain for the Tigers, then having completed an incredible 31-6 record that year (he's still the last pitcher to do so; after baseball, he went on to a rather less glorious career in the racketeering and drugs trade).

They pitched quickly. I mean really fast. They wasted no time out there. And the hitters swung at first and second pitches all the time. These days, hitters wait pitchers out interminably, and then they try to foul off -- "waste," in the argot -- several pitches to make the pitcher work.

One sees the strategic sense, but for the fan, it's sheer tedium. Result: The real-time Yanks-Phils game took three and a half hours. The '68 game, barely two hours.

I knew there was something wrong with modern-day baseball, but I couldn't pinpoint it until last night. Watching a game today gives one the same feeling one gets while watching a piece of heavy machinery move earth. Yes, we see what you're up to. Get on with it.

In addition, the quality of play isn't that dramatically different. Players train more now and so forth, and there are probably more dazzling shortstops now, for example, than there were then.

But baseball relies more on innate skills that are put to use in short spurts than in sustained rigorous athleticism, so 1968's game is less different from today than is the case with (American) football or basketball or even tennis. And they did it in about two-thirds the time.

Therefore, be it resolved!: baseball was better in 1968 than today.

UPDATE: Well, I checked an online box score, and it seems game one in '68 actually took two hours, 29 minutes. Okay, I stand corrected. Still, it's a full hour less than last night's game. And of course in general terms that hour is not spent watching players scoring runs and stealing bases and doing other exciting things. It's spent on time between pitches, fouled-off pitches, and inevitably, more TV commercials. So it's dead time, and an hour of dead time is a long time. Nevertheless I wanted to correct the factual record, as I'm sure a commenter or 10 already has.